Yume wo Kanaeru Zou: Sacrilicious

Although I’ve never cared about anime seasons, I do occasionally get bored enough to take quick glance at season preview charts. A few years ago, a peculiar title in the top right caught my eye.

Halted? Whatever for?

I dug around to find this anime, but all I could find was the J-Drama. No sale.

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago. I’d just finished watching the Liar Game drama and was satisfied enough to consider branching out to other J-Dramas. I’d remembered that Yume wo Kanaeru Zou had a drama, but first I tried to see if the anime had become available. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked for the best-selling novel. It wasn’t translated. I had no choice but to settle for the drama.

The pimp in the middle is Ganesha. Forgive me if I stated the obvious. To the right is the lead character from the TV series. To the left is the lead character from the special, which is a prequel to the TV series. The premise of both the series and the special is that the lead characters are dissatisfied with their lives and one day pray for help. Ganesha shows up and offers to help turn their lives around. He makes them sign a contract requiring them to accomplish any task he assigns or face a lifetime of misery. Although the various tasks initially seem meaningless and mildly sadistic, they ultimately teach valuable life lessons.

I expected the show to be terrible. Much to my surprise, it was not only watchable but largely enjoyable. The show had creativity, humor, and heart. I may have even preferred it to an anime form. Who knows what would’ve happened? The lead characters would probably be 15 instead of 25. Ganesha would probably be a little girl who ends every sentence with ~zou. It’s nice to watch a show about adults for a change.

A few negatives:

Ganesha is apparently the god of shitty puns

Ganesha’s elephant mode is pretty gross

Lame acting at times (although the lead actress has an amusing array of facial contortions)

In conclusion, despite my strong general preference for anime over live action anything (except sports and porn), there’s no question I’d take this show over another generic harem or “slice-of-life” anime. Seriously, take another look at that season preview chart. How many of those shows look better?

You should circle the halted to make it more obvious. It took me five days of searching before I was able to find what you were talking about (doesn’t help that Chartfag doesn’t order his charts alphabetically either).

Also what are you doing watching things didn’t some guy dig out your eyes so you could become a blind pirate? Gosh, go back to doing what’s important for a blind pirate to do.

You’re 65 million years too young to lecture me on post structure. The halted line served four purposes. First, it rewarded those who obeyed my intention of reading through the chart’s entire description. Second, it punished those who ignored my intention and forced them to go back. Third it ensured that everyone understood the show’s premise, because of they didn’t, not much I’d say in the rest of the post would make any sense. Finally, it saved me the trouble of explaining the show’s premise myself. I was also kind enough to drop the hint that the show was in top right of the chart.

I’ve seen few J-Drama adaptation (and even K-drama adaptation) and surprisingly they all ended up enjoyable. In conclusion, I think Japanese knows a lot more compared to Hollywood when it comes to adaptation.

Bloody hell – Hulu/ YouTube vids from The Simpsons that work in my region?! If we’re mentioning Homer in pious mode though, then I like the one where he prays to Superman the best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MILArKLKUEk .

A few negatives… Lame acting at times

I assume you’re talking about pretty boy Shun Oguri. I.e. the tall skinny guy with hair in his eyes and who is probably about to talk about his feelings.

I kept waiting for Ganesha to tell Shun Oguri to cut his hair. The very first thing he told the chick to do was to cut her finger nails. It’s the same principle.

There’s lots of feelings talk, but it’s the productive kind of feelings talk. Instead of talking about their feelings just to vent, they talk about their feelings to fix their problems and improve themselves. I can live with that.

I keep forgetting that you’re still on the timer. Well, 3 months isn’t that long if you keep on running through the J-Dramas. If you already watched Trick, as I mentioned in a previous comment, and you liked that; I suggest you try “Gokusen” next. There’s 3 seasons of it, and it’s fun in a sort of “Great Teacher Onizuka” way. It stars that same woman from Trick, and she’s a really good comedic actor.

I tried watching Trick a little while ago but quit after about 30 seconds because the video quality was fuzzy. I tried watching it again last night. The video quality was still fuzzy. So I watched all three episodes of the Biggu Mazaa arc straight.

Did you DL your own copies of the episodes or stream them? I usually stream from http://www.dramacrazy.net/ but if you find that the quality is too poor, I’d recommend you go with http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/ and try to get a torrent. You shouldn’t have to watch LQ’s for this show, I know there’s some HQ’s floating around out there.

This is random to mention, but I was watching a J-Drama not too long ago and a friend remarked how strange it is that if I were to watch foreign live action works I’d chose those from Japan over Bollywood productions, and I couldn’t find the right words to explain my thoughts to him. But I’ve watched both over the years and as odd as it sounds, the mentality in these J-Drama’s seems less alien to me than some Bollywood works, as strange as that is. Maybe it’s the high levels of anime exposure over the years?